London, July 1 (IANS) Retired lecturer Ian Kinnaird who took a DNA test about his ancestry found he has directly descended from the earth’s very first woman, who lived 190,000 years ago.
Kinnaird, 72, has a genetic marker inherited from his mother tracing his ancestry to an African lineage that has not been found before in Western Europe.
Researchers from Britain’s DNA, who carried out the tests, said the result meant that in genetic terms he was a “thoroughbred,” and could be described as the “grandson of Eve, or the grandfather of everyone in Britain.”
They were so surprised by the results that they phoned Kinnaird, a widower who lives in the far north of Scotland, to break the news to him, the Telegraph reports.
They told him his mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed through the female line, was 30,000 years old and only two genetic mutations removed from the first woman, while most men have a genome with around 200 mutations since the earliest humans.
Alistair Moffat, the historian and rector of St Andrews University, who was involved in setting up the DNA project, said: “It is an astonishing result and means he could have been in the ‘Garden of Eden.’ It is further proof that even white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are descended from a black Eve.”
The project has now tested 2,000 people across the UK and most have markers that trace their ancestry back up to 3,500 years.
Kinnaird, of Halkirk, Caithness, who taught at the North Highland College in Thurso, and was a tutor for the Open University, said he was interested in history but had no particular expectations when he paid 200 pounds for the test.
It also showed his “fatherline” is Scandinavian and he carries a YDNA marker which is found in a quarter of Norwegian men.
He said: “I have led an unremarkable life until now but my computer has been red hot since I was told. This is a real gobsmacker. I seem to carry a gene from west Africa that arrived through the slave trade.”
“I have been researching the links between the slave trade and Liverpool, the area where the female side of my family came from. Africa was part of my geography degree at Hull University in 1959, but I couldn’t have imagined anything like this,” said Kinnaird.
